Hack an iPhone: Apple presents $1 million reward to anybody who can hack an iPhone

It virtually sounds too good to be true — Apple is providing up a $1 million reward to anybody who can hack an iPhone. Its an growth of the tech big’s bug bounty program, however the reward has by no means been larger. 

The bug bounty program, which beforehand provided rewards of as much as $200,00Zero for locating issues in iOS units, first launched in 2016. Apple head of safety Ivan Krstić introduced main adjustments to this system on stage on the Black Hat convention in Las Vegas Thursday, CNET reviews. 

Beginning this fall, the reward shall be elevated to $1 million for the primary time. It would additionally develop to incorporate all of Apple’s platforms — iOS, iCloud, tvOS, iPadOS, watchOS and macOS.

All a hacker must do to get the million {dollars} is achieve full management of an Apple system remotely, with out the proprietor of the system ever interacting with it.

“That is an unprecedented absolutely Apple supported iOS safety analysis platform,” Krstić stated on the convention. 

Discovering different system vulnerabilities end in smaller rewards of as much as $500,000. This system is now open to anybody who needs to take part. It is now not invite-only. 

Apple may even begin providing particular iPhones particularly for certified safety researchers. They’re simpler to hack than conventional iPhones, meant for builders to seek out safety flaws so Apple can repair them earlier than a brand new product launch.

Bug bounty packages at the moment are commonplace amongst tech corporations. Hackers seek for safety flaws missed by inside groups, and as an alternative of exploiting the bugs, they submit them again to the packages for monetary rewards. 

“It will be important for corporations, particularly these coping with mounds of delicate private knowledge, to have a public-facing method to report bugs and vulnerabilities,” Marten Mickos, CEO of the bug bounty platform HackerOne, stated in a press release.

The announcement comes as knowledge breaches turn out to be more and more frequent in tech and monetary industries. 

Final month, Capital One stated a hacker obtained entry to the non-public data of over 100 million people making use of for credit score. And Equifax can pay as much as $700 million over the large 2017 knowledge breach that uncovered the personal knowledge of almost 150 million folks. 

Final October, Google’s troubled social community Google Plus shut down following the invention of a software program glitch this previous spring that will have uncovered the person data of as much as 500,00Zero prospects between 2015 and 2018. 

Even cities are are falling sufferer to breaches. In June, two Florida cities determined to pay a ransom to hackers to regain management over municipal laptop techniques.